This is one of the most useful comments in this thread; there’s not much to say in response to most of it, except “that makes a lot of sense, thank you”. So instead, here’s some commentary to a part of this that I object to:
Take something like learning to wiggle your ears, raise one eyebrow at a time, or whistle. These can’t be explained in words, but words and other stimuli can make it more likely that you’ll stumble onto the correct action.
You may not be able to explain how to do these things in words. But you can certainly explain in words what these things are (for one of them, you just did)! And certainly, if you wiggle your ears, raise one eyebrow, or whistle, that you are doing something unusual (and what you are doing) will be blindingly obvious, without you even needing to point it out.
And so it would be a perfectly unsurprising scenario, if you and I were having an ordinary conversation, and suddenly you whistled (suppose I have never heard anyone whistle before):
clone of saturn:whistles
Said: Whoa! What… what did you just do?? You just made, like, a weird sound!
clone of saturn: yeah, it’s called ‘whistling’
Said: Gosh! Can you do it again?
clone of saturn:whistles again
Said: … fascinating! How did you do that? Could I do that??
clone of saturn: well… it might be hard to explain…
Said: Yeah, no doubt. I mean, I have no idea how I’d go about doing that…! That sure is a really cool thing you can do, though…
Obviously, this is nothing even remotely like the ‘Looking’ scenario, where not only are we merely told that its practitioners can do cool and unusual things (instead of being shown those things, even when we ask them to show us), but the alleged things they can do are so vague and poorly-explained that it’s unclear how we would even notice that they were doing those things, even if we were in their physical presence.
Edit: Of course you’ve already explained the reason for this disanalogy—why no impressive feats may be produced by those who are able to ‘Look’. I’m merely calling attention to it—that it’s not merely a “can’t explain in words, because hard-to-verbalize procedural knowledge” situation, of the ‘whistling’ or ‘ear-wiggling’ sort.
This is one of the most useful comments in this thread; there’s not much to say in response to most of it, except “that makes a lot of sense, thank you”. So instead, here’s some commentary to a part of this that I object to:
You may not be able to explain how to do these things in words. But you can certainly explain in words what these things are (for one of them, you just did)! And certainly, if you wiggle your ears, raise one eyebrow, or whistle, that you are doing something unusual (and what you are doing) will be blindingly obvious, without you even needing to point it out.
And so it would be a perfectly unsurprising scenario, if you and I were having an ordinary conversation, and suddenly you whistled (suppose I have never heard anyone whistle before):
clone of saturn: whistles
Said: Whoa! What… what did you just do?? You just made, like, a weird sound!
clone of saturn: yeah, it’s called ‘whistling’
Said: Gosh! Can you do it again?
clone of saturn: whistles again
Said: … fascinating! How did you do that? Could I do that??
clone of saturn: well… it might be hard to explain…
Said: Yeah, no doubt. I mean, I have no idea how I’d go about doing that…! That sure is a really cool thing you can do, though…
Obviously, this is nothing even remotely like the ‘Looking’ scenario, where not only are we merely told that its practitioners can do cool and unusual things (instead of being shown those things, even when we ask them to show us), but the alleged things they can do are so vague and poorly-explained that it’s unclear how we would even notice that they were doing those things, even if we were in their physical presence.
Edit: Of course you’ve already explained the reason for this disanalogy—why no impressive feats may be produced by those who are able to ‘Look’. I’m merely calling attention to it—that it’s not merely a “can’t explain in words, because hard-to-verbalize procedural knowledge” situation, of the ‘whistling’ or ‘ear-wiggling’ sort.